There has been an intense, emotionally charged debate across our nation regarding the sudden, aggressive enforcement of charcoal restrictions. While Parliament’s recent pause of the total ban offers temporary relief to millions of worried Ugandans, the underlying push to criminalize charcoal overnight remains a looming threat to the core tenets of our National Resistance Movement (NRM) revolution.
Forcing a total charcoal ban on a population without viable, affordable alternatives is fundamentally un-NRM. It flies in the face of our historic manifesto, which centers on mass socio-economic empowerment and the protection of the poor from economic shocks.
We must confront the hard statistics before making policies from air-conditioned offices in Kampala. According to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS), an overwhelming 73 percent of Ugandans rely on firewood, while another 21 percent depend entirely on charcoal for their daily cooking. In urban centers like Kampala, that reliance on charcoal skyrockets to over 82 percent.
As the Senior Presidential Advisor on Political Affairs and Office of the NRM National Chairman Manager, Hajjat Hadijah Namyalo Uzeiye, rightly pointed out to the nation, you cannot restrict the poor man’s fuel before making gas accessible and affordable. A token free gas cylinder kit means nothing if an ordinary family, surviving on a few thousand shillings a day, cannot afford the steep, unsubsidized cost of monthly refills.
What breaks the heart of an authentic NRM cadre is the blatant hypocrisy in how environmental laws are being applied. We are deploying heavily armed security forces—the police and the army—to hunt down a poor grandmother cooking with a small sack of charcoal or intercepting a boda boda rider trying to put food on the table. Meanwhile, the real architects of Uganda’s ecological degradation are left completely untouched.
By focusing the full weight of state apparatuses on the small-scale charcoal value chain—which sustains the livelihoods of over 200,000 Ugandans—we are punishing the victims of poverty rather than the perpetrators of impunity. Furthermore, this heavy-handed enforcement has predictably opened up floodgates of corruption. Reports are already rife that instead of deterring deforestation, roadside checkpoints have merely turned into lucrative toll gates where corrupt enforcement officers extort bribes from desperate traders. The money does not go to the national treasury or reforestation; it goes directly into the deep pockets of corrupt individuals, leaving the common person poorer and the environment equally degraded.
We must ask ourselves a simple, logical question: if a patriotic Ugandan uses his own capital to lease land, plants his own commercial woodlots, matures those trees, and sustainably burns them for charcoal, how does that become a crime? Why should the state treat private tree farmers like environmental terrorists?
- Institutionalized Commercial Licensing: The Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development, alongside local governments, should issue structured commercial licenses for charcoal burning. This will formalize the trade, allowing the state to regulate which areas are harvested and ensure that only mature, non-endangered species are used.
- Aggressive, State-Backed Afforestation: Our focus must shift entirely from punishing energy consumers to massively expanding our tree cover. Uganda loses an estimated 122,000 hectares of forest cover annually. The solution is not to stop people from eating; it is to aggressively plant more trees through nationwide, state-funded agroforestry initiatives.
- Pre-conditions for Transition: A clean energy transition cannot be legislated by decree. Before any city-wide charcoal restrictions are reintroduced, the state must implement the directives championed by Hajjat Namyalo: supply highly subsidized or free gas cookers to low-income households, structurally lower the domestic electricity tariffs for cooking, and build a robust, decentralized network of gas refilling stations accessible to rural and peri-urban areas.
